Memory Iota

By: T.K. Ware

Narrated by: Scott Connery

One year later, after fulfilling the required mission, Michael awakes on a bed. No memory, only a note.

"Hello Michael: You probably have no idea where you are or how you got there. Your last memory is probably when you signed your name and followed one of the doctors out of the room. The experiment you volunteered for has ended. It was a success. Enjoy your new life...."

All seemed well until they found him. Now Michael must fend for his life as a group of mercenaries seek that which he has forgotten....

©2019 Tshombye K. Ware (P)2019 Tshombye K. Ware

Great entertainment for all the wrong reasons

As much fun as I had reading this book I can't recommend it. It ends up amounting to a Gary Stu main character with a pretty suspense-less plot progression.

In Memory Iota, the government has developed (or you know, stolen from a tribal society) a super power serum that grants super speed, sight, and intelligence. In comes our main character, Michael, a recent high school grad who slept through all his classes but still manages to get 100% test scores. Not to mention his football star physique despite not participating in sports. He's has a bit of a bad reputation for getting in fights, but apparently other people start them because he goes to church? The government gets their eyes on Michael after he wins his town's bodybuilding competition. (Not that he practiced, he just thought it would be fun to try). Why were they scouting there in the first place? Who knows! In any case, after some rigorous intellectual testing that includes whether a cup is half empty or half full, they decide Michael is the man for the job.

At this point you'd think this guy is so perfect that the serum should really be donated to some other poor chap but the plot disagrees! And here's where the curious nature of how the plot is structured begins to show. The blurb makes it seem like we're dealing with a Jason Bourne sort of situation, where both Michael and the reader will have to work to discover what he did in the year where he's missing his memories. It turns out this isn't the case at all! We're treated to the details of everything Michael does before he loses his memory, and the mystery isn't much of a mystery at all. This seemed like a bit of a weird choice for suspense, and I was left wondering what the author was trying to build up to. The rest of the plot is reasonable but never really falls into stride of feels high-impact.

As a side point, there may or may not be some killing of targets (it's ambiguous) and there's certainly some beating people up and Michael didn't have any moral quandaries about any of it. That made the Christian elements of the book seem a bit out of place. I'm not a Christian but beating criminals up and stealing their stuff doesn't strike me as biblically endorsed. So including Christian rhetoric without analyzing the moral implications of the character's actions struck as off-tone.

As an upside, the narration of the book is solid. Scott Connery does a good job with differentiating voices. My only critique there is that some dialogue lines could have been acted a bit more heavily. There are a few minor editing errors where a sentence would get repeated, but nothing big.

Overall, a fun book to read but not a good book. The author has promise but I would have liked to see more effort going into the characterization, and making plot events feel more impactful.

Cliche and repetitive

The writing is full of well-worn cliches and does not connect those with any substance. The scenes have little to no transition time, and so the entire book is a confused meandering. The writing reads as though trying to satisfy a minimum word count, with lines repeated in both Spanish and English, as well as the entire text of a letter copy-pasted in 2 places. The characters are not believable and are full of old tropes that have more than run their course.

The performance is marginally better. Most, but not all, characters have clearly distinct voices. There is a good amount of annunciation. The sentences are all without inflection, leaving the listener confused as to what the intent or emotion of a statement was meant to be. The transitions are not made clear in the performance either, as no indication is given vocally that a new scene has been entered. The performer has promise, but needs more practice with inflection, pauses, and emotion in the reading